Shades of the mass death were still everywhere, most of all in the wrecked and filthy ‘dead’ flats from which it was Mashkova’s job to rescue books for the Public Library. Each had its tale of death, looting, suicide; of children arrested, gone to orphanages or simply missing. On 7 April 1943 she visited three such, one in particular ‘typical for Leningrad’:
Once there was a family of six. The father and eldest daughter leave for the Red Army and no more is heard of them. Nobody knows if they are alive or dead. The mother stays on in Leningrad with three children — mentally handicapped Boris, aged eight, Lida, aged thirteen, and Lyusya, fifteen. Bravely she tries to save them from death’s clutches, but can’t do it. In December Boris dies, in January Lida, and then, of hunger diarrhoea, the mother herself. The only one left is Lyusya — on a dependant’s card in a dark, cold, wrecked flat, covered in muck and soot. She drags herself to the market, sells things, then as a last resort, starts stealing from the neighbours. She was caught with stolen food cards and arrested; there’s been no news of her since March of last year. Perhaps she’s dead too. And what remains is a frightening, dystrophic room, full of filth and rubbish. No family — just two empty beds amid the chaos — all that’s left of a once-cosy home. Oh how familiar this is!
There were shades, too, of terror: Mashkova was summoned to the Big House four times, always late at night, in February and March. One meeting lasted an exhausting nine hours. Though she refers to the encounters only briefly and vaguely in her diary (‘I came home angry; I’m sick of complicated relationships’) she was almost certainly being asked to inform on friends and colleagues.
As winter turned to spring her life became superficially more cheerful. On Easter Sunday she and her husband got tipsy on five litres of beer and went shopping for clothes; on May Day they spring-cleaned their flat, had friends round to eat pirozhki and watched the children perform in a school concert. But her depression and self-disgust failed to lift.
Where can we find the strength to live happily, joyously, without endless worry? Why can’t the children be the basis for happiness? They are good children after all, and we should be living just for them. Why can’t we suppress the fear that the rest of our lives will be nothing but strain and effort?. . Is it really just the lack of a piece of bread and a bowl of soup? Are our inner resources really so meagre that this defines everything around us?12
Frequent air raids added to the strain, alerts averaging slightly over one per night from January through to May.13 Shelling — worse in the first half of the year — became so accurate that tram-stops had to be moved and the newly reopened Aurora and Youth cinemas closed again.14 Barrages now fell into an established pattern, coinciding with morning and evening journeys to work. They were extra heavy on public holidays (on 1 May 1943 Vera Inber’s building ‘swayed and rocked like a swing’), and when news came through of (now frequent) Soviet victories. Well-established ‘lucky’ spots included Aleksandrinskaya Square, with its statue of Catherine the Great surrounded by her generals and courtiers, and the Radio House, said to have lead foundations dating from its days as the Japanese consulate. Unlucky ones were the Liteiniy or ‘Devil’s’ Bridge, the square in front of Finland Station, nicknamed ‘the valley of death’, and the corner of the Nevsky and Sadovaya, opposite the Public Library. On 8 August Mashkova’s children narrowly missed being killed there on their way home from a fishing expedition: ‘Suddenly they appeared, words tumbling out about severed limbs, blood, a crushed lorry — then all in the same breath about the three little fish they had caught, still flapping in their net. I kissed them, hugged them, was overjoyed and at the same time felt completely broken.’15
Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva still lived on the Vyborg Side with her maid Nyusha, whose only son had been killed at the front the previous year. During air raids they slept in the hallway, Ostroumova-Lebedeva on a folding chair, Nyusha on a trunk. With each impact the building ‘jumped’; pans fell off the shelves, spent shot from anti-aircraft guns pattered like dried peas on the roof and new cracks appeared in the ceiling. Once a bomb splinter flew in at the window and lodged in a chair, and they knew that if an incendiary landed in the attic the building would almost certainly burn down, since there were no other residents left to stand guard duty. In the mornings the pavements were covered with broken glass, crunchy and glittering. Ostroumova-Lebedeva was kept going by work — her first post-starvation woodcut was a special moment, tools slicing as surely as ever into smooth, golden board — and by the kindness of a loyal circle of friends, mostly younger women artists. For her seventy-second birthday, on 15 February 1943, they brought her a candle, half a litre of milk (for which the giver had walked five kilometres each way to a hospital), a small packet of tea, three sweets and two tablespoons of coffee. Nyusha presented her with a bar of kitchen soap. ‘All welcome and useful presents. . [We] didn’t talk about food, rations, bread, dystrophy and so on, but about books, creativity, art — about the things close to my heart, by which I live.’ In the summer she started going for walks, mourning damage to favourite buildings and picking the clover and buttercups that grew amidst tall grass along the edges of the pavements. The weeds made her feel as though she were walking on ‘free earth, in a field somewhere. . These humble flowers, so delicate and fleeting, bring my soul instant peace and happiness.’
There was more escapism in going over her girlhood diaries, with their notes on turn-of-the-century trips to Italy and watercolour sketches of Lugano and the Simplon Pass. On quiet days she wrote them up in the hospital gardens, amidst slit trenches and vegetable plots. During raids she sheltered in her windowless bathroom, writing on a board balanced across the washbasin. In the midst of a barrage on a hot night in late July a friend telephoned to ask if she was all right:
In between the whistles and bangs of the shells I shouted, ‘We’re still here! We’re still here!’ And remembering that she’d been abroad I added, ‘For God’s sake, tell me what those flowers are called, that grow high up in the snow, in the Alps. I’ve been trying to remember all day!’
‘Cyclamen!’
‘Yes, yes, cyclamen!’
A few days later she and Nyusha had a near miss when a shell hit the roof two rooms away and penetrated down to the bottom floor. Thereafter they went to a shelter during raids, but did not move out.